Funded by a three-year Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2019-2022), Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax was the first large-scale project to analyse interclausal syntax in Sanskrit. Focusing on three major phenomena – anaphora, control and unbounded dependencies – Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax went beyond the standard two-way distinction between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit: by studying a wide variety of texts from different regions, genres and periods, it documented previously unresearched syntactic distinctions between different types of Sanskrit.
Our findings were presented at international conferences and published in major linguistics and Indological journals. We produced descriptive and formal analyses of syntactic phenomena in Sanskrit, and situated our findings in the wider typological context. The project has had a significant impact not only on our understanding of Sanskrit syntax, but also on theoretical syntax, diachronic syntactic change, and sociolinguistic variation in the use of different Sanskrit varieties.
